CMNS 223W Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Urban Outfitters, American Apparel, Crass
24 Mar 2016
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Document Summary
The ideological foundations of advertising have changed signiicantly. Since the 1950s and the discovery/invention of the teenager, there has been a shift in the way status is constructed from within consumer culture: from class to cool. Class is fairly ixed and static; cool is luid, mutable and endlessly deferred. Once cool is discovered or determined, it slips away again. As cool is so changeable and status is always open-ended, we are asked to constantly remake ourselves, reinvent the self and, of course, continually consume the latest that urban outitters or american apparel has to ofer. It"s not so much that advertising deines cool cool usually comes up from the streets, not madison avenue but rather, advertising participates in and even celebrates this perpetual chase for open- ended cool. As advertising is embedded in the perpetual low of popular culture, this shift to cool deepens consumer culture as hegemonic culture as it generates a perpetual low of meaning, consumption and capital.
